Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. Equanimity & Karma
     … No matter how unskillful you’ve been in the past, no matter how much bad karma you have in the past, you are free to choose the skillful course of action right now. And it turns out that if you can do that with skill, you don’t have to suffer, because the suffering that weighs down the mind is not what comes from … 
  3. Elemental Normalcy
     … The reason we meditate in quiet like this, where things are still, is so that you can get good at this skill by giving it your full attention. But you don’t want to use this skill only when things are quiet and when you’re meditating. These are skills you can carry into the rest of your life. For example, today, we were … 
  4. Right Effort
     … You want to arouse the skillful desire to be mindful. To develop concentration, arouse a skillful desire to be concentrated. The term “skillful” here is important. Look at the meditation as a skill, not as something you’re just going to push yourself through with blind effort. But notice what skills are required to get the mind to stay still. Once it’s still … 
  5. Break Things Down
     … As he said, if skillful mental qualities couldn’t be developed, he wouldn’t have taught people to develop skillful qualities. And if developing skillful mental qualities led to suffering, he wouldn’t have taught them to do that, either. The same with unskillful mental qualities: If it were impossible for us to get rid of unskillful qualities, he wouldn’t have taught us … 
  6. Buddhist Engineering
     … You couldn’t develop skills. The Buddha approached the path as a skill. As I said, it’s an engineering skill. You’re putting together a state of right concentration right now, or at least you’re trying to. You start with right effort. If any unskillful qualities come up in the mind, you cultivate the desire for them to go away, and then … 
  7. Basic Meditation Instructions
     … It’s being in the present moment and recognizing what you’re doing that’s skillful and what you’re doing that’s not. Then you want to shape the mind or direct the mind in a skillful direction. This requires another quality, alertness, which means actually seeing what you’re doing while you’re doing it. ] Then there’s a third quality, which … 
  8. Heedful of Death
     … The point being that the most important skill you can develop is the skill that’s able to let go. Whatever appears in the mind that’s causing any kind of weight or concern, you’re able to let it go. This may sound irresponsible, but it’s an important skill that you need to develop, even as you negotiate the issues of every … 
  9. The Raft of Concepts
    The Raft of Concepts August 3, 2007 When you start out meditating, you have to think — but in a skillful way. In other words, directed thought and evaluation are factors of right concentration on the level of first jhana. Even if you can get into concentration really quickly, it requires some thinking to get you there. And if you get into concentration slowly, you … 
  10. Delight
     … It not only presents the issues, but also solves them in a skillful and honorable way, pointing to a happiness that’s free from aging, free from illness, free from death. Take delight in that. The next two types of delight are delight in developing and delight in abandoning: in other words, developing skillful qualities and abandoning unskillful ones. The Buddha recommends this from … 
  11. Honest & Observant
     … This is one of the other prerequisites for not being overcome by past bad kamma—that you don’t let the mind be overcome by pleasure—and this is how you learn that skill. You give the mind a skillful pleasure like this and you learn how to develop the right attitude toward it. When pleasure comes, we usually try to gobble it down … 
  12. Training Your Inner Critic
     … You’re going to be measured by how you held to the standards of skillful conduct, i.e., harmless conduct. That’s going to shape your future. The noble ones want to see you shaping your future in a skillful way. They believe that you can do it. After all, the Buddha said that if people couldn’t develop skillful qualities and abandon unskillful … 
  13. A Rite of Passage
     … So we need a place to step away from them to see if they’re really skillful. Those are the two things: step away and see what’s skillful. Meditation gives you a place to step away, because it teaches you to step away from your thoughts. If you’re going to get the mind still, you can’t get involved with any thought … 
  14. Defeatism? - Anything But
     … They’ve done studies of people who are especially skilled in their areas of expertise. And they found that the ones who are excellent, as opposed to those who are merely good in those particular fields, have a very strong sense that if the skill is not mastered, there’s danger. If the skill is mastered, there’s going to be wellbeing. There’s … 
  15. A Sense of Yourself
     … And it’s easier to apply that perception and have it work when you have other things that you can identify with that are actually skillful. You can’t create a skillful sense of self if there are no skills to back it up. It’s just an empty concept, and you start thinking that you’re lying to yourself. But if you actually … 
  16. The Languages of Right View
     … You can create new, more skillful conversations in a new, more skillful language. So in a lot of ways learning how to meditate is like learning a new language. In fact, you’ve got two languages: the language of mundane right view and the language of the four noble truths. And you want to learn how to use both of them when they’re … 
  17. As Days & Nights Fly Past
     … This is because there are areas in the practice where it is useful to develop a healthy sense of self, a skillful sense of self. This reflection is meant to develop that skillful sense of self through heedfulness, because all skillful qualities in mind come from being heedful. For a lot of people, as days and nights fly past, all they can think about … 
  18. To Keep You Going
     … He often compares all the different skills needed on the path to the skills of archers and cooks, carpenters, musicians: people who learn to take pride in their craft and enjoy doing it well. This means that we’re concerned not only with the happiness that comes from having completed the work, but also with learning how to enjoy the work while you’re … 
  19. The Four Noble Truths
     … It requires a range of skills, not just one. But when you’ve got your full range of skills, you’ve got yourself protected on all sides. Like those movies of the martial arts artist who’s got people coming in from four directions and he can fight them all off. When you’ve got a range of skills on all sides, then you … 
  20. The Power of Your Actions
     … That’s when this principle of acting on skillful intentions and abandoning unskillful ones begins to develop a power. And as the Buddha noted, as you try to be constantly skillful, you’re safe, but it wears the mind down. The mind needs to rest. You could spend some time sleeping, but that’s not necessarily skillful. This is why he says that you … 
  21. Self-reliance
     … The word for ignorance, avijja, can also mean lack of skill. We suffer because we lack skill. But skill is something that can be developed. In fact, you have to develop it yourself. No one else can make you skillful. They can give pointers, they can give advice, but to become skillful you have to be observant of what you’re doing and what … 
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